Download or read book Nation Building written by Wang Gungwu and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2005 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses questions such as: how should historians treat the earlier pasts of each country and the nationalism that guided the nation-building tasks? Where did political culture come in, especially when dealing with modern challenges of class, secularism and ethnicity? What part do external or regional pressures play when the nations are still being built? The authors have thought deeply about the issues of writing nation-building histories and have tried to put them not only in the perspective of Southeast Asian developments of the past five decades, but also the larger areas of historiography today.